UPDATED: Ethiopia plane crash kills 157

All passengers on board an Ethiopian Airlines jet that crashed shortly after take-off this morning (Sunday) have died.

The airline said 149
passengers and eight crew members were believed to be on flight ET302/10 March
from Addis Ababa, Bole International Airport to Nairobi in Kenya, adding that
there were 33 different nationalities on board.

The crash happened
at 08:44 local time, six minutes after the flight took-off from the Ethiopian
capital.

It
is not yet clear what caused the accident.

First word of the
crash came when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed expressed his “deepest
condolences” on Twitter.

In an earlier
statement, the airline said that search and rescue operations were under way
near the crash site around the town of Bishoftu (Denre Zeit), which is 60km south-east
of the capital.

“Ethiopian
Airlines staff will be sent to the accident scene and will do everything
possible to assist the emergency services,” read part of the statement.

Boeing, the company
that built the aeroplane, said in a tweet that it was “closely monitoring
the situation”.

Its
737 Max-8 aircraft is relatively new to the skies, having been launched in
2016. It was added to the Ethiopian Airlines fleet in July last year.

Another plane of the same model was involved in a crash five months ago, when a Lion Air flight crashed into the sea near Indonesia with nearly 190 people on board.